robgough

One of the strengths of Rails was that it helped developers who maybe didn't always know the "best way" to build things to build in a standards compliant way – not that you couldn't do things like return a 200 for Not Found if you really wanted to etc.

I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.

Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.

Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.

It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.

For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.

I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.

At the beginning of this year I was fractional CTO at a small b2b startup and was surprised by how what I considered to be the basic requirements of a customer support platform was split across multiple tools and all priced per-user. This essentially forced a small team to limit who in the org had visibility into what was being communicated to customers.

I set out to solve that with https://stayupfront.com and now that the build is in a good place i’m finally having to bite the bullet and learn marketing. I’m also realising that all the advice to start with marketing first was probably good advice!

If you're on one of the betas for about-to-be-released apple OS’s, there's a new describe an extension functionality and building a dark mode for HN is exactly what I just used it to do. Super easy, and synced across all my devices.

I know this sounds like an ad, but I was pretty impressed with it

The only listed feature here I've not got is the automated translation. It will currently draft responses in the incoming language right now – though that's not terribly useful if you don't speak that language.

I'd been considering mostly an English speaking audience at launch. To be more accurate, I was generally thinking about users physically local to me initially, so I could meet with them for customer onboarding and feedback etc.

Your post has got me thinking on an approach to making translation work in an open and honest way, so that is something I will experiment with and hopefully get in quite quickly.

If you'd be interested in helping me test that, please feel free to reach out to hello@stayupfront.com

I get the temptation to self-host your support platform, as the existing tooling out there can be quite expensive when you want to upgrade from just using an email inbox.

If any founders find themselves reading this, and don't think it's the best idea to self-host your own support infra, I've just spent the last 6+ months building stayupfront.com which has, I think, quite reasonable pricing, and a few more features than this... largely around the customer's portal experience (changelog, roadmap, etc.) and includes monitoring & incident management which I think should all be ran from the same surface.

I've only just soft-launched, so still have founding pricing on there. Would certainly love to speak to others in this space too, as I was surprised how neglected an area it seemed to be when I was trying to find a replacement for jira service desk for a company I was working with at the beginning of this year.

Same here. Over the last two weeks I switched back to Opus 4.8 and turns out that still seems to last the week like it used to. These new models must be eating tokens.

On the other hand, all the little services I'm building for myself are passwordless and use passkeys with emailed codes for setup/reset.

Passwords were a really poor solution to the problem of security, they didn't take the human factor into account. After a rocky start, I'm now finding passkeys super easy and convenient to use. Far more convenient than OTP codes.

I appreciate that if you're OS/browser doesn't integrate nicely with passwords you might be in for a bad time. I'm having a great time with 1Password, though I believe native apple handles them nicely now too – and I suspect this is true of any modern password manager (even the ones built into the browser).

I'm seeing a lot of this across all sorts of apps right now. We're at a sort of cambrian explosion point for software.

I too built my own equivalent of this (belfry.robgough.net). I take it as a good thing, we're all using these tools and coming to similar conclusions.

I suspect over time it'll settle down, once we've gotten comfortable with the new ways of working and found the new normal.

This is great – I built almost the same thing. It's eerie how similar it made that footer on the public websites! Your app definitely looks a bit nicer than mine though! https://belfry.robgough.net

I actually started with a Mac app primarily, as I wanted to have an easier way to switch sessions with the mouse and see Claude Code's status at a glance (I had herdr envy, but wanted to keep tmux). I then figured why not do the iOS/iPad version while I was at it.

Highly encourage you to build out a Desktop version, I'm now using mine as my only terminal and wouldn't go back. Working across machines feels seamless.

obligatory link to https://chatjimmy.ai

I appreciate the kind words. Thank you.

I really wanted to have background audio and make it so the keyboard would directly record audio etc, but my first pass didn't make it through app review (and that was just keeping background audio listening AFTER you'd already started a recording). I could maybe have fought it, but figured if I was already butting up against app review there was little point as they'd likely reject in a future release anyway.

Re: analytics, It is quite weird having no idea how many people are using the app. It does leave you a little blind, but I figure people will get in touch if they have big enough problems with it.

For the Google app, I believe Gemma E2B and E4B both have audio input, so I suspect they're using one of those.

I built my own because I was frustrated with a lot of the free options. Largely because a lot of them had an upsell to be able to do the secondary post-processing step with an LLM. And it wouldn't pick up things like emojis properly or say numbers. Because of that, I left quite a lot of options in there for customising and adding additional steps, etc. Feel free to take a look: dictator.robgough.net

My initial Mac version actually had three additional steps that you could toggle, obviously at the cost of some speed. That is what the website talks about, although nowadays for my own use I've reduced that to just one step and found that it's pretty great. I've got a new version in test to tidy that up, but still lets you define as many steps as you want.

I think that's parakeet doing its job there. That is a closer reflection of what you've actually said. The trick is then throwing that output through some additional deterministic and non-deterministic steps to tidy it up however you prefer. It's exactly what I do with my free and open source dictation app (dictator.robgough.net) for Mac+iOS. And of course, everything stays entirely on-device. Gemma E4B is really wonderful for that second step, it's great at language – but takes up 6-7GB RAM.

It pairs quite nicely with agentic development as it has a history of plenty of open-source projects published on GitHub, which means they have learned to work with Rails et al. rather well.

It also helps to have a "boring" framework with strong opinions and strong community standards etc.

I wouldn't claim it to be the best as I'm not sure how you'd measure that, but I can say that in my experience it is letting me build things to a decent standard really rather quickly.

If you're building something new today, I'd generally recommend starting with a framework that you already know. But for those of us who already know Rails, it continues to be a wonderful choice. I'm playing with Phoenix LiveView for some projects, which is letting me build real-time UI's really easily – but they have some real-time requirements which Rails can do but is not it's strength. For anything a little more CRUD, it's a no-brainer.

Wow, thanks, I'd missed that. It's impossible to keep up with Anthropic and their rather erratic way of operating.

What makes you think your usage is getting cut by 50% post July 13th? It's just that you can use up to 50% of your usage on Fable right now, and that is what is going away.

I'm going to miss Fable too, I found it surprisingly tough going back to Opus when we lost Fable first time round, but paying API costs is simply out of the question for me right now.

Quickly switching between multiple sessions, and seeing which sessions are waiting for input.

I generally run a session per project. Then within each session, a window for Claude, a window for running whatever dev server/logs, a window for neovim, and finally a plain terminal window for things like kicking off deploys etc.

I'm a big tmux fan, but admittedly I've found myself switching between a lot of sessions recently and wishing it was a little bit more mouse friendly.

If you're a Mac user, and can forgive the shameless plug, you might find belfry.robgough.net useful. Connects to local and remote machines entirely through tmux, ssh and libghostty - populating the sidebar from tmux session info, and optionally adds a little Claude visibility in there for good measure.

There's even an iOS/iPadOS version – though for the moment you'll need to build that yourself. Source is all on Github.

I've been surprised by how far my motivation has taken me. I have multiple projects now that are so much further ahead than I have ever managed before. I would get stuck on some small issue or key-decision and then would struggle to move past it.

Certainly, I still have those tendencies, but it's easier than ever to push through and build a throwaway version with code that might not be what I end up shipping, but is enough to help me understand the final shape of the solution. Once that happens, I'm unblocked and away I go again.

The mental cost of building throwaway code has essentially dropped to zero for me. Of course, I keep working now until light mode comes on automatically on my Mac, but that's a whole other problem.

They've said there are limits, and increased limits for those on iCloud+ ... so it seems that Apple is in the selling LLM access game now. I don't think there are any details yet on the nature of those limits, and whether they can be increased as required etc.

Have you seen that they've added an `fm` tool? It was mentioned in the Platforms State of the Union.

Here's what you get when you run it... https://gist.github.com/robgough/7893602895e7580117475076198...

I'm fully expecting an updated foundation model of some kind, but I would bet money they don't utter the words "Google", "Gemini", or "Gemma" even once.

Mac only I'm afraid, but I already did [1]. Packaged it too as I figured it might be useful to others [2] (and I'd want to install it on machine's that I might not have Xcode on)

[1]: https://github.com/robgough/dictator [2]: https://dictator.robgough.net

I spent the best part of a couple weeks making improvements and tidying up the UI, but to actually get something working was essentially only a couple of prompts.

I've got a home-built dictation app that uses a local model to clear up the text and fix grammar. It was super easy to build. I’m extending it to capture meeting notes and summarise too. All on-device.

I saw a little app the other day, I think someone posted on here, that looks at your screenshot and renames the file based off the contents of the file.

There's tons of little examples like that. For a lot of use cases, you really don't need the frontier models.

I recently built a similar app, and so hit the same limitations – I wasn't too upset on Mac, happy to distribute without the App Store (though it's a shame).

Where I was more frustrated was how much this limited the potential usability of the iPhone app. Because of app store restrictions it is a far worse app ... though like in your example, still useful to a degree.

I can only hope they use the new CEO as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate their entire approach to how they work with developers, though I'm not actually expecting them to. If anything, with the increase in apps being created via AI tools I worry they will go the other way.

It's not as powerful as Gemma 4, but I think they likened it to GPT-3. It's perfectly capable of looking at images and classifying them at the level you'll need for this app. And it runs everything on the Apple Neural engines, so decently quick. Of course, this assumes that your users are using Apple Silicon processors, I believe that's the limitation – and they must have enabled Apple Intelligence which downloads the model at that point.

As clever as this is, it seems like the names are fairly straightforward (as you'd want!) – did you try using the on-device Apple Foundation model at all? That's actually pretty powerful for a use case like this, and if you're happy to require the user has Apple Intelligence turned on already, your shipped app can end up being tiny. The biggest concern for an app like this is how much RAM you end up using trying to run it. Especially if we end up with lots of different apps all doing the same thing.

Being able to super-power apps with on-device models is a lot of fun. I recently did the same building my own dictation app using small local models, and I still can't believe how effective it is. The download is just 20mb, though it will download parakeet ~475mb for audio, but can use the on-device model as the second-pass LLM and works pretty well (though better models are available to download and use e.g. Llama 3.2 4bit and Qwen 2.5 7B 4bit)

I'm currently building a little tool for a professional photographer friend to go through and classify images in their photoshoots, so I can build a searchable db for them to quickly find very specific images in the future. I simply don't think it would have been possible for me to build a tool like that just a couple years ago at any price.

Review times have already spiked, apparently, although I've never found them particularly good. There used to be a third-party website that tracked this via user submissions, though that was shut down when they made genuine efforts to improve timings several years ago as it was deemed no longer neccesary.

I think it's a fair criticism that there will be a lot of people putting "lower-quality" apps on there. I do think Claude did a better job of this than I would have managed. It certainly seems to work well enough.

I do believe Apple will have to rethink exactly what they want to gatekeep and why. If nothing else, in the context of allowing people to get more out of their powerful devices. For example, I wish my iPad Pro could actually do more useful things with it's M4 processor. Hopefully that's something the new CEO has on his list.

I think that's a fair question. For this app I didn't see the harm in releasing it. You have to pay for the account etc. to get it onto TestFlight anyway, so I might as well just put it out there. And avoids me having to resubmit every 90 days. There also wasn't a lot of custom "me" stuff in this one, but I could see going that route for other apps in the future.